Wicked Delicate

Tales from the documentary filmmaking life in Maine

Dear friends,

After a decade of hibernation, the Wicked Delicate newsletter is hereby reborn as a weekly journal of my filmmaking shenanigans in Maine. Or maybe a good title is: dispatches from a life in the documentary ditches. Suggestions are welcome, and unsubscribing is easier than ever, but to paraphrase Herodotus, “a journal from Maine is gold from the camel’s bottom.”

Herewith, entry #1: 

Spring has come to Maine, which is to say I have seen a daffodil. The ’75 Dodge pickup is back on the road, after overwintering in the woods near Mom and Dad’s house. You don’t want all that winter road salt eating up your Dodge. You leave it in the woods, with lots of little minty packets that are supposed to keep the mice out. I love those little packets. 

An old pickup truck is an essential tool, on par with the Century stand or the pocket knife, for The Wicked Delicate Filmmaker Life. Not just because it can haul things around the countryside, but also because its frequent breakdowns are reminders that filmmaking is an absurd endeavor. You have no choice but to proceed with joy and doggedness. More rational vehicles - the minivan, the pickup truck made in this century - abound, but they are out of step with the madness.

I will write more of this general madness in the days to come. Perhaps it’s the core through line in this journal. Which reminds me, I should say what this journal is for. 

My main aim is to chronicle this working life, and in the process answer some of the questions that have come my way. These questions come from two main sources: first, aspiring filmmakers who want to understand how to live (or avoid) the Wicked Delicate Filmmaker life, and second, friends and family members who are not convinced I do anything at all. (Little I say here will disabuse them of this impression.) I will spend part of the time relating what I’m working on these days, and part of the time regaling you with uninteresting tales from yesteryear. Allow yourself to be unimpressed that it took me ten years to come up with this winning recipe! 

Speaking of which, let’s go back in time a bit. 

South Boston, Massachusetts in 2007. I lived on Telegraph Hill (the place where Henry Knox hauled his cannons to hold off the British) with my friend and cinematographer Taylor Gentry, who had come out from Iowa to help us shoot a movie called The Greening of Southie (2008). Taylor drove a ’79 Mercedes. I had an ’86 Dodge pickup that Granddad had given me after he’d gotten too old to horse around with it. (Granddad, better known as Fayette Rumsey Plumb II, opted for a minivan which he’d somehow kitted out with an amazing crane in the trunk that would unload his motor scooter.) The third guy on our team, my best friend Curt, drove a ’66 Volvo. 

One winter day, we had to get out to Quincy, ostensibly to interview a dumpster magnate who had a dump truck tattooed on her bum, but also to pay homage to the town where Dunkin’ Donuts was founded. My Dodge wouldn’t start, which was no surprise on a cold day. We loaded the gear into Taylor’s ’79 Mercedes, but he’d forgotten to plug it in (it’s a diesel, and liked to be warmed in the winter), so we soon found ourselves pushing Curt’s ’66 Volvo down Telegraph Hill in an attempt to jump it. (This was the opposite of what Henry Knox was up to.) We got the Volvo going, and made it as far as the Southeast Expressway before it gave out and I had to call my Dad. He picked us up in his 21st century pickup and we made it to Quincy - not in style, not even on time. I can’t remember if we stopped for Dunkins. 

While we’re on the topic of beverages (we mostly went to Dunkins for the coffee in those days), I would like to point out that a reasonable and affordable alternative to Sancerre, the great sauvignon blanc from the Loire, is called Quincy.

What’s a Century stand? We usually call them C-stands. They’re a sturdy and universal stand for holding up lights, microphones, scrims, and all sorts of other things you might use if you’re not late for a dumpster/tattoo/backside interview and have time to set up lights and microphones and scrims. If you’re a traveling documentary filmmaker, you usually rent them wherever you’re going, because they’re heavy and long. If you shoot in your own neck of the woods, you buy a few and keep them around and trip over them and wonder where to put them. On proper movie sets, where you have different people for each doggone job, most people would never touch one. But in The Wicked Delicate Life in Maine, you touch C-stands all the time, no matter who you are. 

Here I was using one to experiment with some title cards for The Arc of Oblivion (2023). The C-stand has a little arm that attaches to it, and you use sand bags to keep the thing from tipping over. I had to pour gasoline over the whole thing to get the paper to light up properly, and so this particularly C-stand ’s arm is now quite sticky, burned, and disgusting. It looks wonderful in the Dodge. You can look up Century stands on Wikipedia if you want to, I’m sure someone knows where they got their name, but that isn’t the sort of thing we print here. Also, please note that BURNING THE NAMES OF YOUR FUNDERS AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS does not turn out to be a popular look for the opening credits. Like Curt’s ’66 Volvo, this idea was eventually retired. 

I should note that in the days of The Greening of Southie, our team didn’t have C-stands. I don’t think I even knew what one was, so impoverished was my film training. We had a few cheap light stands, and Curt found a handsome red light stand in a dumpster down by the Old Colony projects. I still have that one. Which is partly to say, in the Wicked Delicate Life you pick things up as you go. There’s no school where I could have learned what I know now. If there were such a school, it would be a School of Madness and I would love it so much.

Some months after we premiered The Greening of Southie, Diane Sawyer invited us to talk about it on Good Morning America. I got to stay in a gaudy hotel in Times Square, where I filmed some time lapses for the next movie I was working on, about light pollution. When we showed up at 5am for the segment, there was little evidence Diane had watched the movie, but she was gracious enough to look straight at the camera and say to her audience, I kid you not, “Really important, you guys…” and then introduce the film. Really important, you guys! This is first rate madness. First of all, she calls her millions of viewers “you guys.” Then she calls The Greening of Southie “really important.” What cosmic craziness. Anyway, she’s retired. I bet she drives an old pickup now, but doesn’t worry a whit about the salt. 

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